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WIG&TSSIP: The Stress Situation

August 1, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

When I first began thinking seriously about how stories are told I came up with a metaphor that helped me see plot and character as a functional model. My idea what that a character is like a pressure cooker. With no heat under it a pressure cooker is static, stable, unmoved. But add heat and the pressure begins to build. Subject the cooker to enough energy and at some point the release valve is going to be triggered or the cooker will explode.

Granted that’s a bit dramatic, but it worked for me because it had all the necessary parts. A vessel (character), energy affecting the vessel (plot), and a predictable, inevitable outcome (change/revelation) determined by mixing the two.

Because I was writing literary fiction at the time I knew any movement of character resulting from the build up of pressure might be subtle or slight, and preferably ought to be. In practice I fumbled the ball plenty, variously understating to the point of uncertainty and overstating to the point of melodrama, but in general I felt the model held up.

When I first read Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular I was pleased how my own model fit with Hills’ belief that tension is the best method of creating suspense. The pressure-cooker metaphor says nothing about surprising revelations or twists or formulaic models, but simply posits an inevitable progression. Take a character as they are when the story begins and subject them to stress. At some point any character, no matter how resolute or stoic, is going to show the effects of that stress.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, motivation, motive, Rust Hills, tension, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Motivation

July 27, 2011 By Mark 1 Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

This section is one of the reasons why every fiction writer should read this book. It cleaves craft from formula so deftly, so convincingly, that it cannot be refuted. Hills:

Motivation seems to have a key role in creating sequential, causal action, and formulas of fiction and drama speak of it as the “mainspring” of the action. Writers are always being urged to “establish motivation,” to make each character’s motivation as clear as possible, this seeming to be a good way of establishing both characterization and conflict.

Every writer confronts this kind of thinking at some point. It’s impossible to avoid. I was fortunate never to be exposed to formula as craft, but that doesn’t mean the issue of character motivation didn’t come up.

When I was in college I took multiple workshops in short fiction, playwriting and screenwriting. Concerns about character motivation came up most often in playwriting, less so in screenwriting, and least frequently in fiction workshops. While it’s possible my experience was the result of chance I don’t think that’s the case. Rather, I think it was influenced by the degree to which characterization dominates each medium.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, motivation, motive, plot, Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Knowing a Character

July 25, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

It stands to reason that if you want to present a fully-developed character you need to know something about her. Whether you’re individualizing from a type or you have a specific trait or aspect you want to build on, you have to add detail.

What’s interesting about this process is that it’s less about technique than about authorial preference. Hills acknowledges as much by beginning the section as follows:

Who knows how well a fiction writer should know his characters? How much need he know about them?

There’s no right answer. As Hills points out, you only need to know enough to get the job done. If it helps you to work up a comprehensive backstory, then go for it. If you don’t need it, you don’t need it.

Beginning writers wrestle with these questions because they don’t know their own process. There’s no harm in experimenting, unless you write so much about your character that you kill the story you wanted to tell.

It’s tempting to think that writers who tend to start with a character in mind tend to explore character histories more, but I’m not sure. Whether a writer starts with plot or character, that says nothing about that author’s need for pre-planning as part of their own storytelling process. Some writers need to do a lot; some prefer to jump right in and discover what they need along the way.

Some writers develop a drawn out character-discovery process as a means of putting off or becoming comfortable with the harrowing act of authorial commitment — as if rewriting is not also a part of the writing process. If you’re a perfectionist or afraid of failure, beating a backstory to death is one of the best ways to put off that first sentence. Nobody — including you — can ever say you don’t need to know everything you’re discovering about your characters.

Hills spends the bulk of this section asking questions that a writer might ask in order to fully know a character. Here’s an small sample:

Where was he born? Father’s occupation? Mother’s disposition? As a child, did he have no friends, lots of friends, or just one good friend? How was he educated? You know the total effect of his rural or urban upbringing, don’t you? Of his lonely or happy childhood? Okay — then how does he feel about money now, and why?

Hills goes on like that for pages, and I get a sense that much of it is tongue in cheek. Or worse, taken from firsthand experience working with neurotic writers.

Next up: Motivation.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Differentiating From Types

July 22, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

Hills opens this section by acknowledging the utility of types. Between the inherent drama, clear distinctions and time savings gained by using types as templates, there’s a lot to recommend them. But as noted in previous sections types must be individualized.

How is that done? Here’s Hills, making overt what he earlier implied:

In differentiating a main character from a type, the problem is whittling the extravagant back toward the average, a process of individualization.

No matter how many times I read that sentence the same image comes to mind. It is a literal metaphor of an actor leaving the stage through the wings. On stage the actor played a type — an exaggerated character — but offstage the actor moves toward the norm, individualizing from the role they just played. (I would suggest this is one of the fascinations we all have with actors, both as performers-in-character and in real life.)

I am not suggesting that you actually present a type and then attempt to reveal more. I think that’s a mistake and leads to the kind of weak characterization discussed in the previous post. Rather, I think you should contemplate your characters in an offstage context before you begin to write, asking questions that go beyond, but are related to, type. What kind of person would adopt such an on-stage type/role? Who might adapt such a type/role to their own use?  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, Rust Hills, type, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: The Dichotomous Stereotype

July 17, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

It’s generally understood even by nascent storytellers that writing cliche or stereotyped characters is bad. Being able to recognize such weaknesses in the work of others is useful, but ultimately says little about how to construct complex, believable characters in one’s own stories.

For writers struggling to find their way, the dichotomous stereotype represents a logical step in adding dimension to a character, but it’s still premised on writing from types. Like multiplying an equation by zero, it doesn’t matter how complicated the rest of the formula is. The answer is always going to be zero.

Here’s Hills:

The second-generation Italian-American gangster has always been a nationality-group stereotype, the opposite of which is the warm-hearted boy who works hard, plays the violin and loves his mother’s spaghetti. Extremes — opposites — like this can be found within any grouping. Just put the mother’s picture in the gangster’s pocket and you think you’ve achieved some depth of characterization, but all you’ve got is flip-flop typing.

The impulse to go down this road is obvious. Writing from types saves time and makes everything blindingly (if not insultingly) obvious. Television excels at this kind of characterization, but movies and novels are not immune.

I’ve never enjoyed the Godfather movies or the Sopranos for exactly the reason Hills outlines above: I can never get away from the feeling that what I’m watching is a dichotomous stereotype rather than a convincing depiction of character. I also can’t shake the feeling that the world would be a better place if everyone just got thrown in jail or whacked. (Goodfellas is the only mob movie I’ve ever seen that worked for me.)  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, Rust Hills, type, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Type vs. Stock Characters

July 14, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

The full title of this section is Type Characters, as against Stock Characters. It’s a continuation of the previous section, in which Hills makes a further distinction:

Let us say that a stock character is one we have grown too familiar with, through having seen him over and over in films and in novels and stories and on TV, always performing the same role or function in the plot.

Hills defines the stock character as a plot cliche, while the type character discussed in previous sections is a cliche of characterization. It’s a rather tidy analysis, and I think he’s right about the distinction.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, Rust Hills, type, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Types as Exceptions

July 12, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

This is a short section in which Hills makes what at first might seem to be a peripheral point about characterization:

The average farm boy is far more like the average boy from Brooklyn than the “typical” farm boy is like the “typical” boy from Brooklyn.

Boys will boys the world around. And girls will be girls. Genetics and environment provide individualization — as do the life choices boys and girls make — but the commonalities remain. As discussed in the previous section, to write about a type of character is to ignore all commonalities and exaggerate any differences. (If such descriptions become culturally known they risk becoming stereotypes.)

The tendency to write about types — about exaggerated differences — clearly has resonance with drama. A story full of blandly average people is going to seem flat next to a story of radical, exaggerated types. If you’re writing farce or melodrama that might actually be a good thing, but if you’re writing drama, rendering characters as types will almost inevitably conflict with your goals.

Again, it seems to me that the correct response when writing from (or trying to avoid) types is to move toward the average character or the norm — particularly if you aspire to any sort of realism. Typical characters, because they are exceptions, are both exciting and exhausting. They attract attention but don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Whether a type is drawn from reality or from well-worn characterizations common to fiction, the author’s duty is always to make it their own, and make it integral to the work at hand. As Hills notes:

Types then — and this is especially true in writing — are used to distinguish or separate persons or characters, to emphasize differences, and not, as is commonly thought, used to lump them together with a lot of others.

Writers turn to types to create dramatic differences with a minimal amount of effort. It should be noted, however, that writing was never meant to be easy, and that individualizing characters from types should be the minimum you’re willing to do. The maximum would be ignoring types and categories of characters and presenting characters that are organic to your work.

Next up: Type Characters, as against Stock Characters.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, Rust Hills, type, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Types of Character

July 9, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

Hills sets the tone in this section for a number of chapters to follow. Much of the section discusses the various ways in which people have tried to categorize personality types through the ages. It’s a temptation writers have always been susceptible to for obvious reasons. If you can grab a character off the rack, and nobody notices the difference, what’s the harm?

With one important caveat, Hills agrees:

…economy is necessary in creating characterization in a short story, and individualization from a type may be a substantial time-and-space saver over creation of a characterization from the ground up.

The obvious caveat is “individualization”, by which I take Hills to mean an author ought to do something to make each character unique. Types are two dimensional; characters ought to be three dimensional in some sense.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, Rust Hills, type, WIG&TSSIP

Character Movement and Preparation

July 3, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

In the previous post I agreed with an observation by Rust Hills that series television in the 1970’s (and earlier) leaned heavily on static leading characters. More often than not, the series lead was the same paternalistic hero made famous in film by actors like John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. From a narrative point of view this was not without benefits: the audience developed familiarity with the main characters and knew what to expect each week, in the same way you know what you’re going to get when you eat at a fast-food restaurant.

A show like the long-running and wildly popular Gunsmoke (1955-1975) is an iconic example of this storytelling style. Even a fantastic, medium-altering show like the original Star Trek (1966-1969) followed the same tried-and-true formula. No matter what happened the week before — no matter how close to death the cast came, and no matter how many people died along the way — everything was hunky-dory the following week.

Presenting series regulars as fixed characters had two additional advantages. First, there was no need to waste precious air time preparing for change because the regular characters weren’t going to change. They might squeal or grimace each week, but by the next episode they were ready for another go, none the worse for the wear. Second, every drama could be explored through conveniently disposable guest stars, meaning there would be no need to clean up after them or carry any dramatic impact forward. Each new episode was a familiar and clean (if not sterile) slate.

The downside, as Hills pointed out, is that change is the essence of drama. By splitting the impetus and effect of dramatic change between the regulars and guest stars respectively, television dramas inherently muted the potential of the stories they had to tell. It was safe, it was familiar, it was predictable, and the net result was absurd. How many gunfights did Sheriff Matt Dillon have in Gunsmoke? How many crew members did Captain Kirk lose over the course of his five year journey? Did these cumulative body counts weigh on either character week after week, or on other characters?

To be sure there were always attempts to expand the television norm. Writers wanted to do more, actors wanted to do more, but television was a corporate medium first. Brand identification, both in the star power of the actors playing the series leads and in the audience’s familiarity with the weekly narrative was rigorously maintained because it worked. It delivered an audience to advertisers each week, and that audience was never disappointed. Bored, perhaps, but if a viewer wanted more they could always turn off the tube and read a book.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, drama, preparation, Rust Hills, television, WIG&TSSIP

WIG&TSSIP: Series Regulars vs. Guest Stars

June 22, 2011 By Mark 1 Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

The full title of this section is The Series Regulars, as against the Guest Stars. As you might suspect, the title references television drama, and advances the assault Hills began two sections earlier. Continuing the discussion of characterization forward from the previous section, Hills states:

You can perhaps see better how it ought to work by looking at television series dramas, which have got it all just exactly backwards.

As I said in response to the aforementioned section on slick fiction, it’s important to remember that Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular was originally written in 1977. Television has changed a lot since then, but at the time Hills’ criticisms were accurate. Continuing from the above quote:

The regulars in the classic TV series never change. They are the fixed characters. The doctors, sheriffs, private detectives and police chiefs, who are the central figures of these programs, always remain the same. If they are shown falling in love, you know the girl’s got to be done away with….

Hills goes on to explain how guest stars in circa-1977 television dramas were the characters who ended up changing or being moved by the story, and as a first-hand witness to television of that era I can tell you he’s right. That’s pretty much what TV was like, and I’ll have more to say about that in the next post.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, Rust Hills, television, TV, WIG&TSSIP

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